Reclaiming History (240 page)

Eddowes, in his obsessive belief that a Lee Harvey Oswald imposter killed Kennedy and was then killed by Ruby, was so persistent and created so much fuss on both sides of the Atlantic that he actually succeeded, with the support he had gained from Oswald’s widow, Marina (who had come to believe that Oswald’s body was no longer in the grave—she was “99% sure” of it), in having Oswald’s body removed from its Fort Worth grave on October 4, 1981, to see who, if anyone, really was in it. Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, had died on January 17, 1981, but before she died, she refused to cooperate with Eddowes, saying Eddowes’s contention was “an asinine theory.”
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And Robert, Oswald’s brother, had originally gotten a lower court injunction prohibiting the exhumation. However, a state appeals court overruled the injunction. Eddowes himself paid for all the costs and was present at the grave site. A team of two forensic pathologists and two forensic odontologists under the direction of Dr. Linda Norton examined Oswald’s skeletal remains at the Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas. Norton told reporters after the nearly five-hour examination on October 4, “We, both individually, and as a team, have concluded beyond any doubt, and I mean beyond any doubt, that the individual buried under the name Lee Harvey Oswald in Rose Hills Cemetery is Lee Harvey Oswald.” Among other things, the pathologists compared and matched the teeth of the remains with Oswald’s Marine Corps dental records of October 25, 1956, and March 27, 1958, and also found, in the skull, the scar made by surgeons in 1945 when Oswald, age six at the time, had a mastoid operation.
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At the time of the exhumation, Dr. Norton, a former medical examiner of Dallas County, was the associate chief medical examiner in Birmingham, Alabama. The rest of her team consisted of Dr. Irving Sopher, chief medical examiner for the state of West Virginia; Dr. James Cottone, head of the Forensic Odontology Department at the University of Texas at San Antonio; and Dr. Vincent DiMaio, chief medical examiner in San Antonio.
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In 1984, the four wrote an article, “The Exhumation and Identification of Lee Harvey Oswald,” in which they set forth their medical findings. Though the decomposition of the remains was severe, they “estimated” Oswald’s height as “5’8½.” They noted that “a gold wedding band and a red stone ring were removed from the fifth digit of the left hand” and that “Mrs. Porter” (Marina) identified the rings as those which she “placed upon the body at the time of initial burial.”
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Eddowes estimated to reporters that the multiyear effort on his part to get to what he perceived to be the truth in the assassination had cost him, since 1963, “more than $250,000.” Chastened by the medical findings, he told reporters, “Though surprised, I am in no way disappointed in the apparent disproving of my evidence of imposture. Rather, I have accomplished my objective in obtaining the exhumation.”
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One would think that Eddowes’s bizarre theory was laid to rest with the reinterment of Oswald’s body, but believe it or not, some conspiracy theorists remain unsatisfied, arguing that the body of the real Lee Harvey Oswald may have been substituted for the body of the impersonator, who was originally buried in the grave.
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And just four years later, and undaunted by (in fact, totally ignoring) the 1981 findings, conspiracy theorist R. B. Cutler, for years the editor of the
Grassy Knoll Gazette
, and his fellow theorist W. R. Norris self-published their book
Alek James Hidell, Alias Oswald
, in which they allege that the person buried in Oswald’s grave is not, as Eddowes claimed, a KGB agent, but a CIA agent whose name was Alek James Hidell. “Oswald was
not
murdered by Ruby,” Cutler assertively declared in his letter to me of July 24, 1986. So we learn from Cutler and his coauthor that A. Hidell was not the alias we believed Oswald frequently used, one that his wife, Marina, knew to be “merely an altered Fidel”
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denoting Oswald’s reverence for Cuban premier Fidel Castro, but a real person who impersonated the real Oswald.

Without a tad of evidence to support their crackpot theory, the authors surmised that Hidell was “a Russian student [in the United States] recruited by the CIA to be a spy in the Cold War.” They go on to say that “
next to nothing
is known about Hidell’s life,” which is remarkable since it suggests at least something, however little, is known about someone who never existed. They say it is a “reasonable guess” that Hidell was born in Riga, Russia, in February of 1938. The Russian CIA agent “substituted” himself for Oswald in 1958, the authors tell us, when Oswald was stationed in Japan. Like Eddowes, they say that it is “unknown” what ultimately happened to the real Oswald. According to the authors, the fake Oswald returns to the United States in 1962 under the name Lee Harvey Oswald, and like Eddowes’s fake Oswald, fools even the real Oswald’s mother and brother as to his true identity. The authors claim that Hidell was a “patsy” who was set up by his “handlers,” the CIA and FBI, and that four other men assassinated Kennedy, Hidell finally being murdered by Ruby.

The two authors, who refer to themselves in their book in the third person, leading the reader to believe someone is writing about them, are so hopelessly confused that although they start their book claiming the CIA was behind the assassination, one of them (Norris), after finding a former CIA and FBI “operative” kneeling at Oswald’s (actually Hidell’s) grave with flowers (he knew “Oswald” from their days as CIA and FBI operatives and felt terrible for what happened to him), is convinced by the man that the John Birch Society, not the CIA and FBI, was behind Kennedy’s assassination. But Norris, without any explanation, later in the book returns to the fold in pointing the finger solely at U.S. intelligence.

Cutler and Norris don’t seem to be concerned about the fact that at the time they say the CIA substituted their Russian-born agent for the real Oswald in 1958 as part of their master plot to assassinate Kennedy, Kennedy wasn’t even president. Eisenhower was, and Kennedy hadn’t yet even announced his intention to run for president. But hey, the CIA was clairvoyant. Nor do they seem concerned about the same problem Eddowes had, such as the real Oswald’s fingerprints, taken in 1956 (before the “substitution” of Hidell for Oswald in 1958), matching up with the fingerprints taken in 1963 of the man they say was a CIA agent.
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Now, if they can get around the fact that no two humans have the same fingerprints (more unique than DNA, since identical twins do have the same DNA), maybe they can keep their mad theory alive.

T
he most significant alleged Oswald impersonation took place during Oswald’s trip to Mexico City in late September and early October of 1963. The evidence could hardly be more overwhelming that Oswald (not an impersonator) did, in fact, go to the Cuban consulate and Soviet embassy for the purpose of securing an in-transit visa to Cuba ostensibly to be used by Oswald on his way to the Soviet Union. Yet conspiracy theorists have persisted in claiming, against a tide of irresistible evidence, that it wasn’t the real Oswald who did these things. Jim Garrison refers to the alleged imposture in Mexico City as “the most significant of [all the Oswald] impersonations.”
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As we saw earlier in this book, Oswald crossed the border into Mexico at the city of Nuevo Laredo at around 2:00 p.m. on September 26, 1963.
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Records of the Flecha Roja bus line show that Oswald arrived in Mexico City around 10:00 a.m., September 27, 1963.
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He checked into the Hotel del Comercio, per the owner and manager, sometime between 10:00 and 11:00 a.m., and paid for five nights’ lodging (at the peso equivalent of $1.28 in U.S. currency per night) at the subject hotel for the evening of September 27 through the evening of October 1, 1963.
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Oswald left Mexico City for Laredo, Texas, on the Transportes del Norte bus line at 8:30 on the morning of October 2,
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and crossed the International Bridge from Nuevo Laredo into Texas at about 1:35 a.m. on October 3.
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Señora Silvia Tirado de Duran, a twenty-six-year-old native of Mexico who worked in the visa section of the Cuban consulate of the Cuban embassy, processed Oswald’s request for his visa on September 27, 1963. In a statement to Mexico’s Federal Security Police the day after the assassination, she positively identified Oswald and related the facts of his visit to the consulate.
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Virtually the sole basis for the allegation of imposture comes from Eusebio Azcue, the former Cuban consul in Mexico City. As we saw earlier in the book, Oswald had told Duran he was a friend of the Cuban Revolution, and felt the documents he presented to her (documents showing he lived and worked in Russia, marriage certificate to a Russian citizen, membership in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, letters to the American Communist Party, etc.) should entitle him to a visa. When Duran, herself a Marxist and sympathetic with Oswald’s objective, told him nonetheless that she could not grant him an immediate Cuban visa, that he would first have to get a Russian one and this would take some time, Oswald became very angry, causing Duran to call for Azcue’s assistance.
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Coming out of his office, Azcue listened to Oswald’s request and told Oswald the same thing: it would take time, perhaps ten to twenty days. Azcue testified before the HSCA that the first time he saw Oswald in connection with the assassination was about two months after the incident at the consulate, when he saw the film of Oswald being killed by Ruby. Azcue said he was certain the person in the film was not the same man he saw at the consulate. The man at the consulate, he said, was “over 30 years of age and very thin, very thin-faced. And the individual I saw in the movie was a young man, considerably younger, and [had] a fuller face.” Of course, Oswald is only shown for a second or two on the film before his face is contorted almost beyond recognition with shock and pain. And Azcue conceded “that the conditions under which I had seen him in the film at the time he was killed, with distorted features as a result of the pain, it is conceivable that I might be mistaken.”

When HSCA counsel showed Azcue the photograph of Oswald attached to the visa application, he said the man in the film more closely resembled the man in the photograph than the man he saw at the consulate. Though he testified that “fifteen years [have] gone by so it is very difficult for me to be in a position to guarantee it in a categorical form,” he nonetheless believed that the man in the photograph “is not the person or the individual who went to the consulate.”

Azcue did not testify before the Warren Commission, and a full ten years before his HSCA testimony on September 18, 1978, he may have been influenced by New Orleans DA Jim Garrison’s pronouncements in 1967–1969 that there was an Oswald impersonator in Mexico City, though Azcue told the HSCA that Garrison merely “reaffirmed [his] view” that the man at the consulate was not Oswald.
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If Azcue’s opinion were all one had to go on, it would be entitled to great weight. But
all
of the other evidence conclusively establishes that the real Oswald was at the consulate:

1. Silvia Duran spent much more time with Oswald than Azcue did, and upon seeing Oswald’s photograph in the Mexico City morning newspaper
El Dia
the day after the assassination, she immediately recognized and identified the person in the photo as being the same person who had come to the consulate.
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Although later, to the HSCA, she described the American at the consulate as being around five feet six inches and 125 pounds with light blonde hair,
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*
a description that doesn’t precisely match that of Oswald, she has never wavered in her belief that it was Oswald.
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2. Alfredo Mirabal Diaz, one of only three people—along with Duran and Azcue—to see the man identifying himself as Oswald at the consulate,
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and who was in training at the time to replace Azcue as Cuban consul, also identified Oswald as the person seeking the visa.
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3. As indicated, Oswald arrived in Mexico City from the states around 10:00 on the morning of September 27, 1963. The working hours of the Cuban consulate were 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., and the American seeking the visa first came to the consulate on the morning of the twenty-seventh.
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Oswald’s visa application also bears the date September 27, 1963.
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And on the fourth line of the application, the date September 27, 1963, in Spanish, is typed.
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4. A photograph of Oswald is stapled to the visa application.
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And, indeed, Duran testified that she told Oswald he would have to have a photograph of himself to attach to his visa application and she referred him to a few places near the consulate. Oswald left the consulate and returned “in the afternoon” that same day, September 27, with photos of himself, which she checked to make sure they matched up with the man before her.
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5. Handwriting experts from the CIA concluded that the signature “Lee Harvey Oswald” affixed to the visa application is the signature of Lee Harvey Oswald.
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The HSCA, discovering that the name “Lee H. Oswald” was also signed on a copy of the application, had its own handwriting experts examine each signature. Their conclusion was that both signatures belonged to Oswald.
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6. As if the above weren’t more than enough, the American seeking the visa acted exactly as Oswald so often did—angry, persistent, and intense. In her statement to the Mexican Federal Security Police, Duran said that when Oswald was informed of the fact that he could not get an immediate visa to Cuba, “he became highly agitated and angry.”
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She told the HSCA, “He was red and he was almost crying, and uh, he was insisting and insisting…[Azcue] opened the door and told Oswald to go away…I was feeling pity for him because he looked desperate.”
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And Azcue testified before the HSCA that the man “was very anxious we grant him the visa…We never had any individual that was so insistent or persistent…He was never friendly…He accused us of being bureaucrats, and in a very discourteous manner.”
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